Media as soldier’s assistant

Al Rasheed hotel was a target because the suspicion in Pentagon was that the hotel’s basement was some sort of an Iraqi communications centre. Ever since word went out that Al Rasheed was a target, journalists were once again looking for guidance from their sources allegedly plugged to the Pentagon to indicate safer hotels.

But once President Bush issued that ultimatum from the Azores, the journalistic population in the Iraqi capital began to thin out. Needless to say, there were no Indian journalists to cover the war from Baghdad except for my colleague, Satish Jacob and myself on an assignment for Third Eye TV to be telecast on Doordarshan. My return leaves Satish as the sub- continent’s eyes and ears in Baghdad, even more so since Brij Tyagi, India’s ambassador, reluctantly shut shop and drove to Amman.

I am not convinced that embassies must shut shop. After all, engineers from the American interest section in the Polish embassy had visited most of the embassies, equipped with fancy instruments to pass on the particular building’s co-ordinates to whichever satellite above was identifying structures “not to be hit.” This exercise had been done at the Indian embassy in great detail. Why then this urgency to leave Baghdad?

The assessment could well have been that even if the embassies were spared the air strikes, there may be social upheaval in Baghdad.

Everybody points out that the Shias settled in Baghdad city (Baghdad’s Dharavi resembling any sprawling urban slum) are crime prone. Lawlessness may grip urban centres should the central authority in Iraq collapse. In which case nobody will be safe.

Some of this of course, is propaganda. The first Gulf war was covered when Baghdad was saturated by a hail of missiles. Peter Arnett became a legend for having ushered in the era of live coverage of wars when, from the roof of Al Rasheed, he brought home the images from the first air strikes to the last. Why did western journalists not flee Baghdad then just when it was hotting up as a story?

My guess is that this time CENTCOM’S Gen. Tommy Franks, who is incharge of the military operations, has set up a successful department for media management. And Tommy Franks does not want pictures of dead men, women and children, burning Iraqi homes, hospitals overflowing with wounded civilians.

Such pictures will disgust the world and enrage Muslim populations. The way to keep such disturbing pictures off your TV screens is to create such a scare of Armageddon in Baghdad that the journalists will flee.

But there is another set of journalists, the major networks, stars like Christiane Amanpour, John Simpson and Lyse Doucet who are taken into confidence at the highest military levels. At the next tier are reporters and TV crews who have been “embedded” with various units of the Air Force, Navy and the Army involved in the operation.

These reporters are mostly in Kuwait, Doha (the forward headquarters for CENTCOM) and in Arbil, the part of Kurdistan protected by the northern no-fly zone.

What will these “embedded” journalists cover? Just imagine yourself with a military unit in the desert or in the mountains. You will probably be living in three star tents arranged by Brown and Root or whoever else has the contract for pitching the tents.

You will end up describing the soldiers, their equipment, the sing songs in the evenings about the loved ones they have left behind, briefings by smart and articulate officers, but nothing of the pain of Iraq. Stories of bravery, not of pain.

Live TV coverage of Bosnia, the intifada, air strikes over Afghanistan, all created adverse opinion in the world particularly the Muslim world.

This time the world will not be served up images that will create adverse opinion for Bush and Blair. Instead, we shall have soldiers missing “mother’s home cooking,” living dangerously inside gas masks, totally oblivious of the nuclear tipped bunker-busters being rained on a country to isolate a tyrant. And who will remember the bunker-busters when the world’s eye will be riveted on the victorious armies marching into Baghdad with Amanpour, Simpson and Doucet in the vanguard.

Write to saeednaqvi@expressindia.com